5. Women Education:
The UK government, during the first half of the twenty-first century, developed and extended learning opportunities for both young people and adults, across their life course; by expanding and enhancing educational opportunities beyond secondary or compulsory education, and higher education. In the 1960s UK higher educational opportunities extended from a very low base of less than 10 percent of the age cohort of 18 year olds through, first, the creation of new universities in the wake of Robbins Committee report of 1963, and, second, the implementation of what became known as a ‘binary policy’. This policy for higher education used previously for secondary education that created target opportunities for students (David et al. 8-9).
The number of women in education grew dramatically and the participation rate for young people doubled from 15 to 30 percent. Their percentage of the undergraduate education doubled since the time of the last inquiry into higher education (the Robbins Committee, 1961), thus, women considered now a majority of the student population, with their demographic representation (qtd in David et al). Women now have overtaken men in numbers pursuing higher education. Thus, the rate of increase of women’s participation in higher education doubled more than men, such that women now outnumber men in part-time and full-time undergraduate and postgraduate studies (Scott et al. 1-7).
6. Women in Employment:
Women’s lives in the UK saw enormous changes from the 1990s. The proportion of women in the labor market grew markedly. Women now hold 45 percent of the workforce, up from 38 percent in 1971. Yet, the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act in the 1970s were important milestones that break down the barriers to women’s participation in the labor market. Even though wages remained low in many occupations dominated by women there still a gap in mean hourly earnings between men and women of 18 percent for full-time workers and 40 percent for those working part-time. As the Fawcett Society report Are We There Yet? 30 Years of Closing Gap between Men and Women (2005) notes, women still suffer ‘sticky floors’ .i.e. they remained low-paid jobs. For instance, women’s work as caring, cleaning and catering not paid well and still limited opportunities for training and promotion. Moreover, they experienced ‘glass ceiling’9, which mean the lack of acceptance and senior jobs can be done on a changeable basis comprised with discrimination to stop women with family responsibilities to gain senior positions (Scott et al. 9-10).
However, the proportions of women gained educational qualifications increased comparing with others; because women’s participation levels in the UK higher education now exceeding men’s. Female’s graduates now work in a much better range of occupations such as production, management or transfer of knowledge or information. As a result of the nature of the work, some sectors and occupations demand graduates (for example, the information and communication technology sectors). In other areas it related to the need within organizations to recruit women with high-level qualification into occupations (ibid).
Above all, the status of women in the United Kingdom improved since the 1990s, the British women gained a respectful position in social and political life. The discriminatory barriers removed for women after implementing some mechanisms to enhance and promote women’s representation that supported by the Labour party that sought to include women in the political sphere. Also, women gain a high position in education and employment domains. In fact, the status of women increased totally even they didn’t achieve gender parity with males.
Part two: the Status of Women in the USA
I. Historical Underrepresentation Of Women:
In the past decades, women's role in the political life received much less attention. So firmly women excluded from this most public and obvious area of decision-making that in the consideration of woman's position their potential political activity often comes almost as an afterthought (Scott 3-4). As an American political scientist states in his study of women in politics with the words: “In politics American women have been virtually invisible. Political scientists, mostly males, have tended to overlook this major group.” Women stayed irrelevant in political life, except for sex, motherhood, and service. Also, politics controlled access to resources, and men controlled the entire range of resources to satisfy their needs. They sought to perpetuate this homo-social system by excluding women. The trend toward representative government in the nineteenth century decreased women’s political power (ibid).
The society designed females’ lives which deprived them of their rights. First, women suffered from a social handicap in varied domains such as, different socialization, less education, and low self-esteem, which resulted in traditionalism, parochialism, and erratic behavior (Scott 5). Second, women-centered by family, they obliged them to vote like their husbands, and to be the authoritarian figures, for instance, father substitutes; and they thought that women have to suit family-focused issues like children welfare. Then, women deviated from the norm, i.e., they are apathetic, conservative, emotional, and they responded to personalities rather than issues (ibid). Society humiliated women’s presence in the American life and build barriers against women improvement.
Historically, only small numbers of women elected to public office. The struggle for women's suffrage and political efforts sought to change public policy and to promote greater social and economic equity for women but it failed to increase women’s presence in public office (Clark 66). In 1920, few suffragists attempted to hold public office. Suffragists considered the vote as a means to lobby male representatives or to bypass elected officials using the initiative and referendum. As a result, women remained underrepresented at all levels of American government for many years. Women's representation in state legislatures grew slowly in the years between 1920 and 1970. Few women have ever served in the U.S. Senate. The first, Rebecca Latimer10 of Georgia, was appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the death of the incumbent in 1922. To date, a total of 16 women served in the Senate (ibid). Women were underrepresented in social and political life in the United States of America.
• American Women’s Suffrage:
Women’s suffrage in the United States started in 1776 with the constitution of New Jersey which enfranchised all adult inhabitants. Laws enacted in 1790 and 1797 permitted women to vote regularly, whereas, a law passed in 1807 referred to excluding women from the vote in that state (Wellman 138). The first woman who gained the first chance to vote was Lydia Taft, an American suffragist, who benefited from voting three times in New England town meetings that began in 1756 in Massachusetts (Chapin 172).
The women's suffrage activists experienced abolitionism as anti-slavery activists that helped them in their suffrage movement (Stearman). In June 1848, women’s suffrage became an important principle in the Liberty Party platform. The Seneca Falls Convention enacted in New York, it comprised some activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, charismatic leaders used their organizational ability and their political acumen to help gain suffrage and other rights for women, began a seventy-year struggle by women to secure the right to vote. For the first time, they signed a document known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. Equal rights became the important demand of the early movement for women's rights, which lead to freedom (Schenken 37).
In 1850, Lucy Stone, an abolitionist lecturer and suffrage leader, helped in organizing an extended assembly which was known by the National Women’s Rights Convention, took place in Worcester, Massachusetts. Susan B. Anthony, a resident of Rochester, New York, joined in 1852 after reading Stone's 1850 speech. The three leading figures of the 19th century of U.S. suffrage movement: Stanton, Stone, and Anthony who sought to gain voting rights for women (Schenken 664).
Women's suffrage activists noticed that black people who granted the franchise even they are not included in the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Activists claimed that this is unjust. The territories of Wyoming drew the first steps (1869) and Utah (1870) (“Women's Suffrage”). The Governor of first Wyoming territory named John Allen Campbell, who firstly initiated the United States Law giving women the right to vote on December 10, 1869. This day called later Wyoming Day (“Wyoming Territory”). On February 12, 1870, S.A. Mann, a Governor and Secretary of the Territory of Utah, passed a law to grant women aged twenty-one-year-old to vote in any election in Utah. In 1887, the Congress approved the Federal Edmunds-Tucker Act to disenfranchise Utah women. During the end of the 19th century, women enfranchised in three states Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. As a result of hard efforts made by the suffrage associations also Colorado state enfranchised women by an 1893 referendum (ibid).
By the beginning of the 20th century, the National Women’s Party founded by Alice Paul, an American militant suffrage leader, organized a strike outside the White House. She encouraged by Emmeline Pankhurst while in England, and with the help of Lucy Burns, a member of the congressional union, controlled a series of protests against the Wilson Administration in Washington (Van Wagenen). The Wilson administration reacted to the protest on June 20, 1917, after the suffragists stated in a banner: "We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement", the protest occurred during the presence of a Russian delegation to the White House (Zahniser and Fry 175).
On August 14, 1917, another banner made a comparison between the plights of the German people with the American women. As a result of this kind of protest, many women arrested and most of them jailed (Ciment and Russell 163). In the same year on October 17, the suffragist Alice Paul put in jail for seven months and on the 30 October she started a hunger strike, but after a few days, she obliged to stop her strike (Stevens et al). President Wilson changed his opinion after many years of opposition, and in 1918, he supported women’s suffrage (Lemons 13).
On June 4, 1919, the Senate passed the amendment of giving women the right to vote, after much opposition of parties occurred in a debate around four hours; which democratic Senators opposed the decision. The Ayes comprised 36 (82%) Republicans and 20 (54%) Democrats. The Nays contains 8 (18%) Republicans and 17 (46%) Democrats. The Nineteenth Amendment ratified by sufficient states in 1920 ("Suffrage Wins in Senate.”).
II. Women Representation in Public Offices:
Since the early 1970s, women gradually increased their representation on local governing councils and in state legislatures and executive branches. In the 1990s, women gained their greatest representation in Congress. Also, they increased their number in State Legislature, the Cabinet, and the Judiciary, even their participation remained fewer compared with men who still dominated the public offices, but they are better than before the 1960s.
1. Women’s Representation in Congress:
Political observers stated that 1992 considered “the year of the women.” In that year, twenty women entered The House of Representatives and five women entered The Senate. The first women member of Congress called Jeannette Rankin, was a Republican of Montana, who took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1917 (Schenken 163; Clark 67). Women in congress raised new issues and presented new perspectives on other issues because their life experiences differed from those of men, because the hoped to change their situation for better life ensuring the realities of women’s lives, voices, needs, and interests according to their experience, not to male interests (Dodson 2). Thus, the number of women serving in the U.S. Congress raised from the 1992 elections, and their number didn’t decline after the 1994 cycle, the 103rd and the 104th Congress. The 103rd Congress passed a record number of bills aimed at helping women, children, and families (Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues 1994). In both The House of Representative and The Senate, women comprised a smaller proportion of the majority party in the Republican-controlled 104th (7, 2 percent and 5, 7 percent) than in the Democratic-controlled 103rd (13, 6 percent and 8, 9 percent) (ibid). Women’s presence in Congress opened new opportunities for them to achieve their goals and demands.
According to the Congresswoman Nydia Velezquez that states:
… [B]efore I came here, I worked for a congressman….I saw that women’s issues were not part of the national agenda….It hasn’t changed. So [while] it is our responsibility to participate in every single issue…and every debate that we have here …if we don’t force others to focus on women’s issues…it will not be part of the debate (qtd in. Dodson).
In the 2000s, the number of women in Congress raised markedly. They held more seats, 56 of 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representative (13, 6 percent), and three of 100 U.S. senators and 3 of the 50 governors were women. In 2003, women elected Chairs of Democratic state parties in twelve states and Chairs of Republican state parties in thirteen states, and in 107th Congress (2001-2002), women headed the Democratic Party Campaign Committees; it helped the parties candidates to raise money and compete to raise the party’s representatives in the U.S. (the House of Representatives and the U.S Senate). For instance, Washington Senator Patty Murray chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and New York representative Nita Lowy chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees (Burrell 105).
Today, women held 23, 8 percent of state-level offices. In 2008, women appointed for just 16 percent of seats in the 110th U.S. Congress; 16 of the 100 Senate seats and 72 of the 435 House seats. In that year, women held various positions, such as, the position of governor (eight states), lieutenant governor (ten), attorney general( five), secretary of state (twelve), state financial officer (eleven), state auditor (six), state controller (four), chief state education official (eleven), commissioner of insurance (two), public service commissioner(five), and railroad commissioner (one). Despite this development, the halls of the Senate still dominated by men. Some opinions argue that it is a matter of preference. Women interested in issues related to family and social welfare, rather than national defense and international relations for that they stay out of politics or they focus their efforts on local offices and initiatives. Although these numbers may be disappointing but they represent an increase never seen in the (Carr 58-9).
2. Women in Presidential Cabinets:
The American National Government appointed only two elected members of the Executive Branch, and no woman ever served as president of the United States or as Vice President. Although some American presidents appointed women to their cabinets; the President Carter’s appointed 17 Women that received 13.5 percent of full-time positions and required the confirmation of the Senate. Thus, they received 9.0 percent of President Reagan's appointments. In October 1989, the President Bush appointed to some states granting office to women while others rarely elected women to high office. Yet, despite the intensifying representation of women in American government, the United States sought to increase the number of women’s representation within the Cabinet (Clark 67-8).
In 2003, twenty-nine women held Cabinet or Cabinet-level in the presidential administrations. While Democratic Presidents appointed sixteen of these women, the Republican Presidents appointed thirteen (Burrell 158). For instance, the President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Francis Perkins, was the first woman who held a Cabinet position, in 1933. Furthermore, presidents that succeeded the Roosevelt administration, like the President D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Roland Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton appointed five women to their cabinets (Schenken109). Women on the White House staff constituted from 6 percent during the Eisenhower Administration to 39 percent in the Clinton Presidency. Also, seven women served as assistants to the president in the first year of the Clinton Administration (qtd in. Burrell). Then, more women appointed such as Condoleezza rice as National Security Advisor, and Karen Huges as Councilor to the President in 2001 at the beginning of George W. Bush Administration. In fact, women finally achieved a presence in the inner circle of White House staff (Burrell 169).
3. Women in the State Legislatures:
Women's representation in the State Legislatures increased slowly but not necessarily steadily in the years between 1920 and 1970. Their number progressed gradually in the decade of the 1920s but it stopped during the Depression in 1930s. Also, another raise happened during World War II and continued to intensify through the 1950s. Then, another decline in the actual numbers of women legislators occurred in the 1960s, however, the number of women made up less than 4 percent of state legislators by 1970 (Clark 66). Furthermore, 1991 seen for the first time in the American History women served in every State Legislature in the nation; all the states except Nebraska, was unicameral, appointed at least, a woman in the House and one in the Senate. For instance, American woman to serve in a State Legislature was the Republican Minnie Buchingham Harper, who appointed in West Virginia Legislature in 1920, succeeded her deceased husband. The number of women’s representation in the State Legislature increased slowly from 1920 to 1970 (Schenken 637).
State Legislatures saw a slow, steady gender transformation. In 1971 the year Congress established "Women's Equality Day" and the first issue of the magazine Ms. appeared as an insert in New York magazine – women accounted for just 4.5 percent of state legislators. The number of women serving their local constituencies quadrupled from 344 in 1971 to 1,732 in 2007. Women now hold 422 (21.4 percent) of 1971 (Carr 58).
4. Women in the American Judiciary:
The American Judiciary saw steady increase in the number of women since the 1990s. Thus, the first woman who served in the Judiciary was Esther Morris in 1890. She appointed in justice of the peace in Wyoming (qtd in. Palmer). Women's participation in the State Bench increased significantly since the 1970s (Williams 68). While, in 1992, another woman arrived to the Bench of Ohio state Supreme Court, named Florence Allen. Furthermore, in 1934, she appointed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals by the President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and she considered the first woman that served in a Federal Court of General Jurisdiction (Palmer 235-6). Women’s integration into the Judiciary intensified slowly.
In 1999s, some states appointed women in their Supreme Court with percentage of 24, 2 percent except New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and 22 appointed at least two women in their Supreme Courts. President Kennedy announced firstly a public commitment supporting the appointment of women to the National Bench, but he appointed only one woman. While, President Jimmy Carter administration saw the first increase in the number of women on the Federal Bench; he supported the nomination of women and minorities publicly stated that:” If I didn’t have to get Senate confirmation of appointees, I could tell you flatly that… 40 percent would be women.” His administration saw a steady increase from 1, 4 percent to 7 percent (qtd in. Palmer). Although, the number of female Judges raised slowly under the Reagan and Bush administration, but the next increase occurred in the Clinton administration; Clinton appointed more women to the Federal Bench compared with all of his precedent presidents (ibid). Women’s presence in the American Judiciary saw little increase in the 1990s.
While American women participated in public life across the United States but their participation remained not constant across all offices. In 2005, women were 22 percent of state Judges. Women's greater representation in legal careers suggests that there are a significant number of women eligible to serve on the judiciary, more so than would potentially exist for some other office (Williams 68).
5. Women and Education:
In the 1960s, several Federal programs increased educational opportunities for women and men. In 1974, the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA) passed; it sought to provide educational access and opportunities to women and girls. Thus, the elite private schools and medical schools admitted women using quotas on the number of women they accepted, public and private institutions implemented varied admission standards for women and men while other schools refused married women or women with children (Schenken 223-4). Furthermore, in 1972, the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments changed women’s access to higher education which prohibits gender discrimination at institutions that received federal funding giving women equal access to college admissions and enlarged women’s educational options. Also, it enhanced women’s athletic programs (Schenken 223-4; Burrell 15). Women’s educational opportunity started from the beginning of the 1960s and later enforced with many amendments and acts to enhance their chances.
Women went to college in ever-increasing numbers since the 1970s. In 1983, the Bureau of the Census statistics reported that women expanded their enrollment lead over men; 108 women for every 100 men in 1981 enrolled in college (Burrell 15-16). Yet, between 1960 and 1998, the National Education statistics showed that college- enrollment rates of female high school graduates intensified from 38 percent to over 69 percent. In contrast to men that increased their college- enrollment too from 54 to 62 percent. Furthermore, women’s with college degrees increased from 5 percent of women aged twenty- five and older in 1945 to nearly 25 percent in 2000. In the twenty-first century more women than men earned college degrees; also, more women earned Doctoral or professional degrees and overtook men in earning associate, Bachelors, and Master’s degree, in addition, they narrowed men’s lead in earning Doctoral and first professional degrees (ibid).
6. Women in Employment:
The conditions of employment for women improved since the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and succeeded by the Equal Pay Act of 1964. Discrimination in employment on the basis of sex banned and equality of pay for equal work achieved. In the 1970s legislation that concerned with federally funded employment programs prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. Although, a steady increase in women’s labor-force participation appeared in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Women’s presence in professional employment enlarged and saw an increase in their earnings relative to men’s and their occupations typified by high earnings, for instance, in 2002, 47, 5 percent of full-time wage and salary workers in Executive, administrative, and managerial occupations occupied by women (qtd in. Burrell).